RABBI AKIVA, THE FOX, AND THE SIX-DAY WAR
In those critical, tense weeks before the Six-Day War, I was just coming near the end of my first year at Cambridge University. And for those three weeks we all felt that something terrible was going to happen, after all the troops were massed on the Egyptian and Syrian borders. All of my generation born after the Holocaust feared that we were about to witness a second holocaust. All the Jewish students, vast numbers of them, turned up in the little shul in Thompson’s Lane to pray. I’ve never seen so many people there before or since. The atmosphere was absolutely intense. And for me it was life-changing.
As soon as we saw the paratroopers, as soon as we heard the words “Har HaBayit beyadeinu” (“The Temple Mount is in our hands”), I knew I had to go to Israel and see it for myself. I went there, and looking from Har HaTzofim (Mount Scopus), down on the Old City, I suddenly realised that I was standing at the very place that the Mishna and Gemara talk about at the end of Tractate Makkot, when R. Akiva and three of his rabbinical colleagues are standing on Har HaTzofim looking down on the ruins of the Temple. And the other Rabbis are weeping, and R. Akiva is smiling.
And he says, “Why are you weeping!?”
And they say, “Look at the Holy of Holies – it’s all in ruins! A fox is walking through there! The place that only the holiest man, the high priest, could enter only on the holiest day, and now it is nothing but ruins. Of course we’re weeping. Why are you not weeping?”
And R. Akiva says, “Because there were two prophets who gave prophecies. One, Mikha, saw the city in its destruction and another one, Zekharya, saw it rebuilt, and saw it as a place where ‘od yeshvu zekeinim uzekeinot birḥovot Yerushalayim,’ where old men and women would sit at peace in the streets of Jerusalem, and the streets would be filled with the sounds of children playing.
“So if I have seen the fulfilment of the prophecy of destruction, am I not convinced that there will one day come true the prophecy of rebuilding and restoration?”
And as I stood where R. Akiva stood two thousand years earlier, I said to myself, “If he had only known how long it would take, would he still have believed?” And then I realised, of course he would still have believed, because Jews would never give up hope of Jerusalem. We never allowed it to escape our minds. In any of our prayers, at our weddings, we always remember Jerusalem. Every time we comfort mourners we say, “HaMakom yenaḥem etkhem betokh she’ar avelei Tziyon viYerushalayim.”
You know, Jews were a circumference whose centre was Jerusalem. And I knew then that a people who could never forget this holy city must one day return to it. And as I stood there, soon after the Six-Day War, I suddenly realised that faith brought back Jews to Jerusalem, and will one day rebuild its ruins. That is the most powerful testimony of faith I know.